The expectation at work to remain competent, motivated and attentive for the entire workday puts a huge strain on our biological resources. Thankfully modern science has given us a better understanding of how our bodies work, which can help us leverage our physiology to work smarter.

By implementing a few biological disciplines, you’ll be able to work with your body and avoid unproductive behaviors like impulsivity, sleep deprivation, and stress.

Here are some hacks based on the biology of productivity that can help you and your team perform at their best:

If you work on a remote team, there’s a good chance you’ve struggled with managing time zones.

With coworkers and subscribers spread all over the world, it can be hard to keep track of what time it is where your colleagues are. Even if you’re not working remote, it’s easier than ever to end up doing business with someone in a different time zone. As our world becomes more connected, our differences in time zones become even more important to manage and understand.

Here at I Done This, we face this challenge daily. We’re a small team dispersed across 3 different continents. The work day is finishing up for some of us just as it’s getting started for others, which is why asynchronous communication is so important. There’s only a short window of time for us to communicate in real time and that window is critical to our productivity.

Here’s a look at some of our favorite tools for managing time zone differences.

Put simply, encountering blockers is great for teams. It’s a simple idea that any team can borrow from, but you need a process and tool to do it.

That’s why we’re adding “blockers” to our “done lists” here at I Done This. Putting all blockers in one place means that team leaders can help those who need it quickly. It also means that individuals can reflect on their own blockers, and see if they point to a greater issue that needs resolving.

All teams can benefit from using blockers to their advantage. Here’s what it can do for your team.

As your employees’ heads are tucked behind computer screens and they’re clacking away on the keyboard, it seems near impossible to know how they’re spending their time. Are they in a private Slack channel chatting away about the new hire, or are they working? Should the project you assigned Linda take as long as it has? And if you don’t know what your local employees are up to, you can forget about getting insight into your remote employees time management habits.

In the internet-driven workplace, transparency feels like a pipe-dream. Not only do you have no way of telling whether your employees are slacking off, but you can’t even tell if hard-working employees are being tripped up by obstacles outside their control. The natural response to this issue is to micromanage and hover over their shoulder, but you want to empower your employees in their project team roles, not control them.

I Done This gives your whole team transparency without any of the negative side-effects. Here’s how.

People like to dismiss project management methodologies (PMM) as frivolous techniques that won’t really improve their business’s productivity. While they’re wrong on that account, they actually miss the point completely.

What people don’t realize is that PMMs are more than just process-improvement tools. Project management is really about changing attitudes to create a trusting, collaborative company culture. By adopting practices that encourage communication, unity, and openness, a company can instill positive values within itself and become a great place to work.

We’ll take a look at how companies can use project management methodologies to unify teams and encourage collaborative attitudes for a better work culture.

If you’re running a startup, you can use every little bit of help you can get.

But to justify an administrative assistant or office manager, you’ll probably need to have raised a big seed round of over $1 million or have bootstrapped your company past 10 employees. Otherwise, that extra help getting stuff done is just a luxury you can’t quite afford yet.

Enter Alexa via the Amazon Echo. In the same way Alexa can help you and your family out around the home, it can also make your office and your startup just that little bit easier to manage, so that you can keep your sanity and focus on what’s important.

To get the most out of Alexa, you’ll need to set her up specifically for the office. Here’s how.

Last weekend I found myself in a cafe, alone and without a laptop for around 2 hours. With just my phone, I wanted to do something worthwhile so I decided to organize my tasks properly — something I hadn’t done in a while.

I realized pretty quickly that my task management system made no sense at all.

In the SaaS startup world, there’s always a push towards self-improvement. Every employee tries to learn, memorize, and have working knowledge of everything even loosely associated with their role in the company.

But unlike the tools we work with, we’re not super-computers and we often face information overload. Our brains aren’t designed to soak up, process, and store all the information that we encounter. Ironically, in order to retain more, we actually have to absorb less. You have to be selective about what you put your mind to.

You have a limited amount of mental resources, so you have to free up some of that space by outsourcing. Here’s how.

You’re responsible for coordinating a daily standup with a team of developers, and you’re consistently faced with the same pesky problem: standup tardiness.

Every day you try to have a standup at about the same time, and no matter how hard you try, someone still doesn’t show up on time. This wouldn’t be as big a deal if it were an hour long meeting, but missing eight minutes of standup is missing most of it! Or, if you don’t start without them, you find yourself waiting fifteen minutes to hold a ten minute meeting. The whole point of the standup is to quickly communicate your daily schedule.

You’ve tried different times of the day, you’ve tried giving warnings, and you’ve even stopped making them physically stand up—but, still, all your efforts have proven futile.

The reason: one fundamental misunderstanding between developers and managers.

In this case, those words came from Phil Libin, who co-founded and until very recently served as CEO of Evernote. He helped grow Evernote from a simple note-taking application to the billion-dollar productivity suite it is today.